it's summer; what else have you got to do?

Back when I was 19, I was cranky. Crankier than I am now. (Hard to believe, but it’s true.) I was also president of my Black Student Union, a position I abdicated when I thought it was ok for a white guy to join and, uh, my membership disagreed.

I know, hard to imagine, but there you are.

Anyway, back when I was 19, I was very tired of being everyone’s Guide to Blackness so I thought there should be a basic reading list of sorts to keep everyone from asking stupid questions. I've sensed the same feeling swelling in my breast quite recently so here are the texts that shaped my thinking early on (books and sometimes just authors, because it’s, like, past 1 am – it’s also lit heavy because, well, that’s my training):

For the very basics of black women’s history (literary and otherwise):
Where and When I Enter, Paula Giddings;
Reconstructing Womanhood, Hazel Carby;
Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates
Subjects & Citizens: Nation, Race and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, eds. Michael Moon & Cathy Davidson

For (colonized) black consciousness:
Black Skin, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
W.E.B DuBois

For white identity and performance, racial identity:
Love and Theft, Eric Lott;
How the Irish Became White, Ignatiev;
White Women, Race Matters, Ruth Frankenburg

For ethnicity:
The Invention of Ethnicity, Werner Sollors

Just because their essays kick ass:
Patricia Smith
bell hooks
Barbara Christian
Valerie Smith
Eric Sundquist
Richard Rodriguez (my old lover B- is actually in a correspondence with him…poor B-. Brilliant, yet unbearable.)
Hortense Spillers
Nellie McKay
Barbara Johnson
Paula Gunn Allen
Houston Baker
Homi Bhaba (incomprehensible but read at least one of his essays anyway)
Paul Gilroy (really terrific books on black Britain)
Ida B. Wells
The Grandissimes; Clotel; Passing; The Wedding (a bunch of tragic mulattoes)
Mary Louise Pratt
Gayatri Spivak (utterly incomprehensible, see Homi Bhaba)
Edward Said (cogent and rigorous on imperialism and colonialism)
Richard Yarborough (old prof at ucla)
Jean Fagan Yellin
A monster book titled something like ‘Critical Theory Since Plato’ (for terms)

The point of this list: know a little somethin’.